The differences between top down cleaning done in-home and rug washing in a bath are monumental!

A common practice is to call a carpet cleaner that arrives at your home with a portable truck mounted steam cleaning system. This works great for wall-to-wall carpet, but is a bad decision for your precious area rugs. A full submersion bath offers a deeper and more gentle cleaning for fine rugs.

In home cleaning methods are not effective

The top down or steam cleaning method not only can’t remove all of the soil from the foundation and the pile of the rug, but is also synonymous with harsh and inappropriate cleaning chemicals and detergents. In home cleaning processes involves spraying hot water into the surface of the rug and sucking it up with an extractor.

This not only can damage your hard wood floors, but also is ineffective in removing the dirt buried in the rug. It only provides a surface cleaning, pure and simple.

This process does not allow for proper drying. When the rug doesn’t dry quickly enough, mold and mildew can occur causing great damage to the rug.

To get deep cleaning, only a rug wash removes all the dirt and dust from the entire rug. Combined with climate controlled air drying, washing is the method of choice for the cleaning of fine rugs.

A rug wash is gentle, safe and thorough

The most effective and hygienic way to wash a rug is fully submerged in water. We always carefully inspect the rug for pre-existing conditions (loose threads, white knots, abrash etc.) We thoroughly dust the rug in our professional duster machine. This innovative technology effectively removes all of the sand/soil/particles in the rug fibers.

From there we move the rug to our 1,200-gallon washtub, where it is gently agitates it. This pushes water through the fibers of the front and the back of the rug.

Once washed, the rug is laid flat and rinsed. After washing, the rug is placed in the state-of-the-art centrifuge machine. The rug comes out almost entirely dry. We do hang it in our climate-controlled facility for the final drying.

Once dry, the rug is groomed and rolled for delivery.

An in home carpet cleaner is not your answer for your fine or heirloom rugs if you wish to preserve them for a lifetime. In addition to missing out on the deep cleaning benefits of rug washing, they are not trained in the art of oriental rugs and their origins/dye composition/color bleed correction etc. and may actually damage your rugs.

Think about it like this …if you get yogurt on your shirt, would you just take a wet paper towel and soap and rub it off or would you stick it in the washing machine to flush water and detergent through the fibers of the shirt. It’s simple really.

Cities in our Service Area

Unless otherwise indicated, all materials on these pages are copyrighted by Cunningham's Rug Cleaning. All rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or image may be used for any purpose other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system or re-transmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission.